Wendy's Farewell
by Sarah1281
Summary: Rose wasn't trapped in a parallel dimension and so has continued to travel quite happily with the Doctor for the past decade. Lately, however, she can't help but feel like she needs to move on and try to make some sort of life for herself back on Earth.


Wendy's Farewell

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.

Rose Tyler wasn't entirely sure how old she was anymore and she hadn't been for a long time. It was easy to lose track of the time that one spent in the TARDIS and running about having adventures. The Doctor might claim he was only 907 but he claimed that he was 903 when they first met and she knew for a fact that she had been travelling with the Doctor for more than four years because hers was not the body of a twenty-three-year old.

Rose could try to measure her age but what year is what back at home but the problem was that they could really appear at any point in time – save that one year she was missing. Say they traveled for a week. She could stop back and see her mother minutes after she had last seen her. And even if that weren't the case and every week she was with the Doctor measure up to a week she was gone, she was still nineteen when the rest of the world thought she was twenty due to being gone for so long.

She could sort of approximate how old she was and see if that lined up with how old she was supposed to be on her visits to contemporary London. According to her last check, she was turning thirty in two months. That seemed about right.

Thirty.

That had seemed so old back when she was younger. She was ten when her mother was thirty and she remembered her mum being so much older than she felt she was now. If she made it to sixty then she probably wouldn't think that was old either.

She had always avoided thinking about the future because she had always assumed that she would have none. She would work at a shop like her mother for the rest of her life and marry Mickey and settle down with children who would one day work in shops themselves. It wasn't a _bad_ life by any means but though she hadn't been aware of it, she had always been longing for an escape.

When the Doctor came, it was like a miracle. He saved her before she even knew that she needed it and took her out to see the stars. There had been nothing special about her then, not really, but he'd taken her with him and helped her become brilliant. She wasn't just a shop girl anymore and she never would be again.

Marrying Mickey had obviously fallen through. He had gone back to being a mechanic after he stopped traveling with the Doctor until Jack started rebuilding Torchwood and recruited him. When Martha had decided to stop traveling with them and gone to work with UNIT, the pair had met and eventually married and Martha finally gave in to Jack and Mickey's pleas to transfer to Torchwood.

Jack and Martha had gotten close following the year that never was and that not even she could remember since she was told she'd been killed down on Earth while helping Martha spread the word about the Doctor. While the reminder of her own mortality wasn't welcome for either her or the Doctor – who had to live with her death for months – Rose supposed that it could have been worse. Those memories had driven Martha to abandon the TARDIS, after all, and her entire family spent months in therapy. They all seemed happy the last time Rose had seen them, though, so perhaps time did heal all things.

Torchwood might have been founded to hurt the Doctor but Jack really had turned it around. Every time she saw him or he called (it was always others calling her, never the other way around for fear that she'd call too early or too late in their time stream) he always jokingly asked her to run away with him and work at Torchwood. Though it was a joke, she knew that the offer was sincere. She might have no legal experience beyond being a shop girl but her decade with the Doctor would ensure her a place at Torchwood, at least.

She had been thinking about that more and more lately.

"You're not eating," the Doctor noted, frowning slightly at her.

Rose forced a smile and took a bite of her pasta. "Sorry, I'm just…thinking."

"Penny for your thoughts?" the Doctor prompted.

"Do you even have a penny?" Rose countered.

"I can always look for one," the Doctor offered.

Rose shook her head. "No need to bribe me, I'll just tell you. Doctor, you haven't changed a bit."

The Doctor looked uncertain. "I'm…sorry?"

"I'm not," Rose told him. "Well, I am, kind of, but I understand and it's not your fault and…Physically, I mean. You haven't changed since I've known you."

"Well, except for that one time when I completely changed every cell of my body," the Doctor reminded her.

Rose nodded. "Except for that regeneration, yes. You haven't aged and I have. You won't age and I'll continue to age."

"I could always regenerate into someone older," the Doctor pointed out.

"That would be a temporary solution at best and you're not going to waste an entire regeneration just because I'm getting older," Rose said firmly.

"What are you saying?" the Doctor asked hesitantly.

"The age difference isn't a problem right _now_," Rose replied. "In fact, now we're looking closer to the same age but sooner or later I'll be the sixty-year-old woman with the thirty-something boyfriend."

"I did offer to marry you," the Doctor pointed out.

Rose nodded. "I know but I stand my belief that given all the time traveling it would be too difficult to stay out of days when I'd be alive and thus could accidentally make you a bigamist if you fall for someone else once I'm gone."

"Who's to say that I'd want someone else?" the Doctor asked stubbornly.

Rose shot him a look. "Doctor, that's very sweet but let's try to be realistic, shall we? You're going to live forever and it's just not reasonable to expect you to remain celibate…forever. It's not like you'd only have a few years. It would be _forever_."

"I don't care," the Doctor promised.

"Maybe not now," Rose allowed. "And like I said, very sweet, but should you ever change your mind I don't want to cause unnecessary complications or make you think you're betraying me because you won't be."

"This is completely unnecessary," the Doctor assured her, "but alright."

Rose remembered the expectant way River Song had looked at the Doctor and privately disagreed.

"I feel like such a horrible person for just dropping this on you, Doctor, but…I can't," Rose said miserably. "I've tried to ignore the feeling but it won't go away and it keeps getting stronger. I simply can't."

"Can't what?" the Doctor said, sounding like he had a very good idea of what she was about to say and not liking it one bit.

Rose couldn't say this while looking at him so she squeezed her eyes shut. "I can't keep travelling with you, Doctor."

Silence.

"Why?" There was no emotion in his voice. Rose wished he wouldn't do this, wouldn't withdraw, but she knew him too well by now to expect anything different.

"I'm going to get old, Doctor," she tried to explain. "Time keeps marching forwards and one day I'll be too old to travel with you anymore. What will I do then? I already don't have many ties to Earth and all we ever do is travel from one place to the next, always saving people, always putting ourselves in danger. There's never any time to breathe."

"But I thought you loved that," the Doctor said, sounding wounded.

"I did and I do," Rose said earnestly. "But…it's just not enough anymore. I'm not sure if a life on Earth will be enough, either, and a life like I left behind certainly wouldn't be. But…I need some stability in my life, Doctor. I can't wander across the galaxy forever and Jack's made me an offer at Torchwood. I think I'm going to take it."

Her mum had said once that she had changed so much and that if she continued to travel with the Doctor and eschew her human ties then one day she'd just stop being Rose Tyler and become something else entirely. Something unrecognizable. At the time, Rose had been so angry at her mother for that. Why would traveling the stars with the Doctor make her any less human than anyone else? The entire human race would travel the stars one day. Now she was starting to wonder. She would go meet her mum for lunch and just feel so out of place on her own planet or find herself completely out of touch. And this was just after ten years. What would happen after ten more? Would she die one day, off on a planet no one on Earth had ever even heard of, never to go home?

"_Torchwood_?" The word came out a betrayal.

"Yes, Torchwood," Rose said, struggling not to sound guilty. "You know that they've changed, Doctor, that they aren't like that anymore. They do good work and they help people now. Jack and Mickey and Martha work there so I'd have friends. It's also a far cry from being boring."

"What about me?" the Doctor said so quietly that she almost didn't hear him.

"I love you," Rose said simply. "I fancied you for ages but I didn't realize that I loved you until you sealed me in there with that Dalek way back at the beginning."

Despite himself, the Doctor half-laughed. "You have some timing."

"I know, right?" Rose agreed. "And I wasn't sure about you once you regenerated – though if you had just kept Jack then _he_ could have explained it to me just fine."

"I said I was sorry!" the Doctor protested.

"But then when I saw you sword-fighting that Sycorax I realized that I still loved you, regeneration and all," Rose continued.

The Doctor winced. "Was it when I lost the hand? Please tell me that it wasn't when I lost the hand."

"Of course not," Rose lied.

"It's just…Jack warned me when we first saw him again, right after we went to the end of the universe," Rose told him. "He said that you were like him and that any lovers you might have would grow old and die while you didn't. The most you'd ever do was regenerate."

"Jack's a bit more permanent than I am," the Doctor argued.

Rose shrugged. "It's close enough. The longer I stay here, the harder it will be to eventually walk away and I just _can't_ stay here forever. It's impossible no matter how much either of us might want to."

The Doctor swallowed hard. "If that's what you want," he said bravely, "I can drop you off whenever you're ready."

"Not quite yet, I shouldn't think," Rose said after a moment's consideration. "Let's give it another week."

It wasn't what she wanted by any stretch of the imagination but Rose knew that just the same it was exactly what she needed.

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